[TriLUG] Anyone have their own christmas light show?

[Brian Henning via TriLUG]

I'd encourage you to consider solid-state control instead of some of the relays, as it would give you the option of dimming.  I find instantaneous on/off displays, especially when really bright, hard on the eyes.  Of course, I'm a lighting designer by night, so I'm particularly opinionated about such displays. :-D

John's suggestion of using MIDI is not a bad one.  I'd encourage you to consider it, at least as a format for your sequencing data.

Aside: A family near where my parents live has had a large music-synched display for the past few years; I think they're trying to get noticed by local media.  It's huge, bright, and dazzling, but (imnsho) not artistic at all.  Don't be that guy. X-D

-B

-----Original Message-----
From: TriLUG [mailto:trilug-bounces+bhenning=pineresearch.com at trilug.org] On Behalf Of Rodney Radford via TriLUG
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2017 12:33 PM
To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion <trilug at trilug.org>; TriEmbed Discussion <triembed at triembed.org>
Subject: [TriLUG] Anyone have their own christmas light show?

For years I have been reading about, researching, and wishing for a fancy Christmas light show on my house and I have decided next year I will put together my first setup.

My plan is to build several 8 and 16 channel light control boxes that have power in to the outlets, and be controlled from an esp8266 (arduino + wifi) controller fed to a 8x or 16x channel relay board. This would mean I only need to run one power line to each board and all control sequences can be controlled from one system inside the house.

I plan to put one on each side of the house for the bushes/trees and porch railing, and one on a large cone christmas tree (16x strands of 100 lights each).

I already have 165' of neopixels that I bought for this project about 2 years ago and I want to put them along the roof line.

I am researching different open source control software and have several that look promising, but have not downloaded and tried out yet.

I am reaching out to see if anyone else on the TriLUG and TriEmbed lists already have their own lights and if so, would you be willing to trade a few emails on ideas, suggestions, things to stay away from, etc?

Btw, this is the first video of a long series showing how to build the control boxes and using Vixen software to control the lights. I like the general idea, but I plan to use the esp8266 for the control link instead of a Raspberry Pi and wired ethernet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvG9c84ApFA

I have 11 months until Thanksgiving... that is my deadline.

;-)
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